Tag: Australian art
John Bartley – King Street Gallery on William, Sydney
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: John Bartley Lives: Scott’s Head, NSW. Age: 63 Represented by: King Street Gallery on William, Sydney (no Melbourne representation) His thing: Highly expressive abstract paintings made from shifting veils of colour. Our take. John Bartley was a late starter, beginning at the National Art School (AKA. East Sydney Tech) at the age of 30. […]
Savandhary Vongpoothorn – Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Savandhary Vongpoothorn Lives: Ainslie, Canberra. Age: 49 Represented by: Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney) Her thing: Abstract paintings informed by Buddhist traditions, combining minimalist geometry and calligraphy. Our take. Savandhary Vongpoothorn was eight years old when she and her family arrived in Australia as refugees from war-torn Laos. Vongpoorthorn quickly adapted to […]
Ron Robertson-Swann – Australian Galleries, Sydney
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Good Weekend Art Column,Artist: Ron Robertson-Swann Lives: Botany, Sydney. Age: 78 Represented by: Australian Galleries, Sydney (Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne) His thing: Elegant abstractions in the form of metal sculptures and vividly coloured paintings Our take. Ron Robertson-Swann has been at the forefront of Australian sculpture for almost 50 years. He was one of the youngest artists included […]
Angus Nivison, Paul Higgs
Tuesday, September 8th, 2020 Art Column,If one had to nominate the most high-profile show in Sydney this week, it would probably be Patricia Piccinini’s The Gardener at Roslyn Oxley9. Touted as the most popular contemporary artist in the world in 2106, after two well-attended surveys in Brazil, Piccinini has become a favourite with the art museums. One might compare her […]
Portia Geach Memorial Award 2020
Tuesday, August 25th, 2020 Art Column,Not even a pandemic can dampen down Australia’s love of art prizes. On the contrary, it’s possible the lockdown has inflamed this monstrous passion, as artists have found themselves in the studio for extended periods with no distractions. Perhaps we’ll soon have an oversupply of art to go with the oversupply of investment units. Those […]
Sydney Ball
Tuesday, August 11th, 2020 Art Column,For over a century each new artistic style or movement was viewed as a momentous historical breakthrough, but when everyone started doing it or buying it, the same stuff became mere “fashion”. As the pioneering sociologist, Georg Simmel, noted in 1895, with fashion, the moment of mass circulation spells the end of a particular look, […]
The Art of the Spanish Flu
Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 Art Column,Anyone who thinks COVID-19 has claimed a huge number of lives should look at the Spanish flu of 1918-20. In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between […]
Wollongong Art: eX de Medici, Hana Orszulok, Pamela Griffith
Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 Art Column,Earlier this year French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced a €7 billion support fund, largely intended to help small companies and independent artists. It’s a far cry from the $250 million Scott Morrison is sprinkling on the arts sector in Australia. To think of the arts in France is to think of the Opéra Garnier and […]
John R. Walker, Elisabeth Cummings, Ian Grant, Maria Kontis
Saturday, July 18th, 2020 Art Column,After months in lockdown memories of this season’s bushfire crisis have already begun to fade. People are so fixated on the moment, so ready to focus on present circumstances and forget past vexations, that the fires might have happened in ancient times rather than a mere six months ago. For our beloved Prime Minister that […]
Tom Gleghorn
Thursday, July 9th, 2020 Art Column,Robert Hughes once explained his reasons for leaving Australia by saying that if he’d stayed he would have ended up as the world expert on Tom Gleghorn. It wasn’t a swipe at one particular artist so much as an airy dismissal of Australian provincialism, but it left me with a lingering impression of Gleghorn as […]